The Light of Other Days

Cliff Lampe sheds light today on a book that he actually reviewed in the year 2003, but which due to a glitch in the Slashcode has appeared today. What would you do in a world where privacy is non-existent, and certainty absolute? How would you act? It's interesting to consider how ubiquitous observation and long-term record keeping cause us to approach this mythical world (at least in certain aspects of our lives) even without wormholes.

The Light of Other Days author Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter pages 316 publisher Tom Doherty Associates rating 8 reviewer Cliff Lampe ISBN 0312871996 summary Solid, with strong characters and interesting ideas. The Scenario

It's a stone's throw into the future, and an aggressive Northwest coast company (hmmmm) has developed a new technology for sending data. Harnessing a small wormhole, people are able to send data through the worm hole instantaneously. Alright, suspend disbelief and give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. This piece is just in the very beginning, and things are gonna get a whole lot wackier as we go on.

Some sort of megalomaniac entrepeneur owns the company that patents this technology, as well as several media holdings. He realizes that light waves are just another form of information, and if he can send a wormhole to some programmed location, he gets the scoop on all of his competitors. What's it mean? He can examine documents on the desks of world leaders, catch the famous in all sorts of pecadilloes, and arrange coverage of natural disasters in intimate detail and immediately. As you may imagine, the government catches wind of this and things start going to hell. This is the most interesting central idea to this book. What happens when there is no privacy at all? When your neighbors could buy a machine that allows them to watch you shagging your girlfriend if they wanted to? How are people going to cope with such an open social environment?

But hang on space fans. While society is still reeling from this total loss of privacy, the company with the wormhole patent discovers that by adjusting its strnegth, you can actually watch things from the past as they happen. Eventually they work out sound and navigation, so you can in essence watch any point in history from any angle as many times as you want.

This is the other central theme of this book that makes it interesting. Faced with an infallible memory of events, do things get better or worse? We all lie to ourselves constantly. Memory is more of a negotiation between the brain and the psyche than any sort of reliable record. How do we survive when our illusions are stripped away from us, and we have no more excuses? Every one of your mistakes is there for you, to relive in technicolor as many times as it takes for you to slit your wrists. And soon, it's not only your own sins and errors that come back to haunt you, but those of your entire species. This book deals with the loss of our myths, illusions and constructed realities, and how we go about putting them all back into place.

What's Good?

The best part of this book is the strength of the central ideas. It is plain-old interesting to consider an eventuality where all pretenses of privacy are stripped away, where it becomes nearly impossible to drop off the grid. What lengths will people go to to avoid their spying neighbors? In the book, a secret society gets started to help some people hide themselves away, some people commit suicide and others just give in to it. What would you do?

Another fascinating aspect of this book is the rate of technological change that occurs in it. No sooner does society have to adjust to having no privacy in the present, but the technology shifts and they have to give up their privacy in the past as well as the wormhole is strengthened to allow real time observation of past events. People start to put wormholes in their heads to form some sort of thought collective (yes, like in Diamond Age) and the technology takes a further twist at the end of the book. This whirlwind tour of technological changes imparts a sense of how it must feel for the characters in the book.

Clarke and Baxter do an admirable job of weaving together their individual strengths as authors. The descriptions of the deep past, which is Baxter's purview, are compelling and the contributions of Clarke's are as obvious and as well produced. Baxter has proven to be a quality sci-fi writer and is ably supported by one of the mythic legends of the genre.

What's Bad?

The same whirlwind introduction of elements that are a strength of this story at times become ravelled at the edges and leave a feeling of plot holes. There were times that the story shifts so much that I felt like rubbing my neck in sympathethic whiplash pains. While this does create an impression of confusion that is appropriate to the central themes of the book, it is also distracting at points in the story.

Also, there is a good bit of this book that deals with the personal relationships of the main characters. It's not that these interactions are poorly done, it's just that I would have preferred that ink be spent on delving more into applications of the technology at the center of the story. Now, I'm not one of those wackos that is against any sort of attention to the personal lives of the characters in my sci-fi, but it seemed extraneous in this particular offering.

So What's In It For Me?

At the time of writing, this book is ubiquitous in airports and other places where they have paperback bestsellers available. The Light of Other Days is a perfect read for those types of "trapped-in-a-hellish-flying-box" kind of situations. It's a gripping, complex and thought-provoking book that does not get bogged down in obtuse situational plot devices.

While this may not ever become a classic of sci-fi, it is well worth the effort if you've been looking for something to read. This is definitely above the pack of recent sci-fi offerings and should catch your attention for some relaxing hours of speculation on how you would use your own personal wormhole.

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